As we mentioned in our opening article about remarketing tools for Online Advertising, there are many different remarketing options to help capture additional leads from your website. One of these tools is remarketing for search. Remarketing for search allows us to remarket to users as they conduct searches on search engines like Google and Bing. This type of remarketing gives us the opportunity to create new campaigns targeted towards users who have already visited your website. We can do this in a couple of ways with different tools to help increase sales, registrations, or any goal that you have for your website.

Before you are able to remarket to past visitors, you need to know who those visitors are. A remarketing list is created based on users who have completed some action on your site. A unique tracking ID, a cookie, is then assigned to each user. The cookie essentially follows them as they browse the Internet. These remarketing lists allow us to optimize our bidding strategies for the keywords people who have recently visited your site are searching for.

For example, if you’re an online retailer who sells clothing and accessories, and you want to boost sales for athletic wear, we would create a remarketing list that includes any user who visited your athletic wear page(s), but did not make a purchase. Whenever those users conduct additional searches with keywords associated with your campaign, your ads are eligible to show to those users in that list. There are many other conditions we can base remarketing lists off of. We will give a few examples below.

These audiences that are being targeted in remarketing for search campaigns are ready to take action because they have already shown interest in your product or service. Take a look at the tools below that E-Power uses to help clients meet their business objectives.

Google AdWords Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)The Google Search Network dominates the share of search engines with over 64% of the market. Not only do RLSAs allow us to potentially reach that huge segment of Internet search engine users, but they allow us to reach the users who are more likely to take action on your site. With RLSAs, you are only showing your ads to users on Google Search who have already shown interest in your product or service by visiting your website. This can be set up by targeting users who visited any page on your site or by targeting users who visited a specific page.

Taking the above example into consideration, you can take some steps to help recapture these past visitors by adding additional key phrases and further customizing your Ad Copy to relate even more to those users who visited your athletic wear page. You can also optimize bids on existing key phrases for those in the list, improving your ad’s position on the page.

Google Analytics’ Remarketing Lists for Search AdsSimilar to Google AdWords’ RSLAs, this option allows us to choose certain criteria for audience lists based on metrics available in Analytics instead of relying on Google AdWords. We can get very specific with audiences that are visiting your website. This tool in Analytics was recently announced in June. Prior to the announcement, these options were only available for display advertising.

Google Analytics’ RLSAs differ from Google AdWords’ RLSAs in that Analytics has a massive amount of data that we are able to use in order to construct remarketing lists, allowing us to get extremely specific. Another great benefit of Google Analytics’ RLSAs is not having to add additional code to web pages.

Because of these differences between AdWords’ and Analytics’ RLSAs, we are able to create even more targeted remarketing lists for our online retailer based on a series of conditions laid out in Analytics. For example, we are able to create a remarketing list that targets users who completed one or more transactions on the athletic wear page and generated more than $100 in revenue. We might want to do this to capture additional sales in the future from these customers. That’s just one example. The possibilities are basically endless with Analytics.

Bing RemarketingIn October 2014, Bing Ads launched Universal Event Tracking (UET) for advertisers. This paves the way for Bing Remarketing, which is currently available to some advertisers (including E-Power!) and will continue to roll out to all advertisers throughout the year. Bing now has 20% market share in the U.S., making it a valuable platform for advertisers. With their recent partnership announcement with AOL beginning in 2016, Bing continues to grow and offer advertisers opportunities to showcase products and services. Advertisers using Bing Ads are able to reach a large amount of search engine users who may not have been exposed to their brand in Google’s Search Network.

UET works by placing a tracking code on your website. This sends data back to Bing Ads whenever a user visits a page with code on it, and if a conversion is made, that is recorded in Bing Ads. We can track data for when a user visits a page, how long they stayed on a page for, how many pages a user visited during their session, and when a goal is achieved. These are just a few of the many ways we can collect data about users and their behaviors.

Having the ability to track activity on your website lays the groundwork for remarketing opportunities. For our online retailer, Bing’s remarketing capabilities will allow us remarket to users who spent more than five minutes on the athletic wear page and didn’t make a purchase. Another option is to target users who made an athletic purchase six months ago. We might do this to encourage additional purchases. There are an incredible amount of options to target to users. It will depend on your business goals and objectives.

As you can see, remarketing for search is a useful tool for us to capture users who have already shown interest in your products and services and remarket to them as they continue to search on the platforms you are using to advertise. This can be especially helpful in capturing potential customers who are on multiple devices. A potential customer looking to buy athletic clothing might do research during her morning commute on her smart phone. Later that week, she might do some more research on her tablet from home. This is where a remarketing ad could come into play, which could assist in converting this customer. Capturing the attention of potential customers is important at all steps in the buying process, including these micro-moments where they are looking for quick snippets of information. Then later you are more likely to close the sale with a remarketing for search ad targeted to that user.

E-Power Marketing successfully runs remarketing for search campaigns for several of our clients already. Give us a call and we can discuss how to get started with one for your business. Make sure to keep an eye out for our next remarketing tools post about remarketing for display, which poses some creative options for us to remarket to your website’s visitors.

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E-Power Marketing has been delivering the traffic, sales and conversions our clients deserve since 1998. We want to learn more about your brand and business goals so that we can show you how an online marketing program with E-Power can help! Contact us today!